Dear Editor
Dear Editor 'Le Monde' I agree with most of what John Rehfisch says about Le Monde ("Dear Editor," NL, December 23). But in my comment "Zero for Le Monde" (NL, March 18) I was not, as he thinks,...
...But in my comment "Zero for Le Monde" (NL, March 18) I was not, as he thinks, implying that the kind of unfairness I mentioned was exceptional...
...After seeing "smaller apartments that housed two families," he is admitted to an "unusually large apartment" and learns that the husband happens to be president of the block's CDR and the wife its "educational secretary...
...Isn't he somewhat unfair to Stalin, who invented the system long before Fidel was heard of...
...As for the 110 pages preceding Nicholson's sweeping assertion that life has been improved for "most Cubans," with homosexuals as the only specified exception, well, there is, for instance, chapter 4, entitled "The New Cuban Man...
...Yet when he concludes the chapter, all this is just "a handful of disturbing aspects" in what he calls "Cuba's ideal socialist community...
...Here Sauvage fails to point out that this is not the "start" of my book, but the "start" of chapter 9. Furthermore, the conclusion refers to information presented in the preceding 110 pages...
...It has fewer complexes and is less obsessively anti-American, and much fairer to Britain and the German Federal Republic than when Hubert Beuve-Mery was running it, though it is still afraid to report Eastern European affairs as frankly as it does those of Western Europe and the U.S...
...It was a publicity campaign that reflected the ingeniousness of Fidel," Joe Nicholson enthuses...
...Only a few days before my NL column appeared, 1 wrote to the paper's editor protesting against another anti-American sneer it had published over the signature of one of the more ignorant members of the Academie Francaise...
...To wit: Sauvage erroneously accuses me of making a conclusion before presenting the information on which it is based...
...To wit: He takes an interview out of context and, based on his own preconceptions, claims I failed to perceive a Stalinist parallel and to appreciate the value of an eight-hour day...
...Work championship...
...But the paper's financial position has improved under Fauvet, so the economic excuse for equivocation which one of its staffers once gave me is running out...
...Only in Cuba...
...I do believe there is hope for Le Monde, however...
...Barcelona Ray Alan Cuba In his review "Falling Over Backward in Havana" (NL, December 23), Leo Sauvage criticizes my Inside Cuba for "leaning over backward" to "emphasize whatever, with some stretch of the imagination, could be interpreted as positive.'" In attempting to substantiate his charge, I regret to report, Sauvage has employed the very backward-leaning distortion he is seeking to detect...
...At the start of this chapter, the author speaks with a member of a "semimilitary organization of volunteers" whose "intense brown eyes lit up" when he told Nicholson: "We work seven days a week...
...Leo Sauvage replies...
...He has been shown the files kept on each family, and has noticed that "the attention to detail would have made J. Edgar Hoover turn enviously in his grave...
...But although his welder indeed appears in the chapter entitled "A Housing Brigade" and is supposed to work by choice "11 hours daily and half days on Saturday and Sunday" to become "eligible" for new and cheap housing, that same chapter deals with the CDR, the mass organization in charge of police and politics that controls those housing projects...
...The day it reveals that the "popular democracies" are in fact even more repressive (because more efficient) dictatorships than Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain, it will lose 100,000 readers...
...Nicholson has been told by the CDR that "we don't want any reactionary people, no enemies of the Revolution...
...New York City Joe Nicholson Jr...
...Joe Nicholson rejects the "Stalinist parallel" I accuse him of failing to perceive, which implies he is able and willing to recognize and expose a "Stalinist parallel" when he meets one...
...He also neglects to mention that, in return for the overtime work, the worker becomes eligible for new housing (with rent fixed at 6 per cent of his salary...
...Listening to that obviously and utterly brainwashed youngster, who idolizes a machetero named Juan Torreblanca because he has cut a tremendous amount of cane in one season, the author is reminded of an Eagle Scout in Iowa, not of the Stakhanov cult in Stalin's USSR...
...Which prompts me to ask: Who is it that is falling over backward...
...I am not an American and have never visited America, but since your diplomats in Paris, Madrid and most other capitals I know are so slack about defending their country's institutions and culture when they are attacked by malicious or merely ignorant journalists and academics, somebody has to stand up for you...
...The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...While [the Revolution] has improved life for most Cubans,' [Nicholson] starts with his typical, if not very investigative, kind of objectivity...
...It has improved under Jacques Fauvet's direction...
...While deploring the man's long hours, Sauvage neglects to mention that they are temporary (lasting until the housing is finished...
...Even though he is quoting from a chapter entitled "A Housing Brigade," and even though I described the worker I interviewed as a brigade member, Sauvage writes about him as if he were still at his regular job in a refrigerator factory...
Vol. 58 • February 1975 • No. 3
